Face superiority effect

In psychology, the face superiority effect refers to the holistic way in which the human mind perceives and encodes human faces into memory. Rather than processing all individual facial features individually (nose, eyes, mouth, etc), faces are perceived and encoded as one unified element. This aids the visual system in recognizing thousands of distinct faces, a task that would be difficult if it were necessary to recognize sets of individual features and characteristics. However, this effect is limited to perceiving upright faces and does not occur when a face is at an unusual angle, such as when faces are upside-down or contorted in phenomena like the Thatcher effect and Pareidolia.